Time is a wolf, relentless and fanged, in Ann Yihyang Kim’s paranormal fantasy EYE IN THE BLUE BOX. The novel opens with James Mun sweating through a sweltering summer and cramming instant ramen into his mouth before sleep drags him into the Flowering—a realm where every night’s rest can last up to eight hours, and missing the required fifty-six total hours in a single week triggers a fatal brain aneurysm. Kim’s debut fantasy adventure (the first volume of her Eyes of Awakening series) doesn’t merely construct another parallel world; it transforms sleep itself into a battlefield where James must navigate both supernatural horrors and the familiar weight of family expectations.
The novel’s central conceit—that certain humans are cursed to spend their sleeping hours in a hostile dimension where failure to get fifty-six hours of weekly rest means death by brain aneurysm—operates as both literal plot mechanism and perhaps a metaphor for the exhausting double lives many children of immigrants lead. James, a Korean-American engineering intern on the cusp of grad school, finds himself thrust into the Flowering during his first night—where “white dust clung to his bare skin as he pushed himself back onto his feet.” Kim constructs this nightmare realm through accumulating strangeness: a tree bearing cartoon eyes, a monstrous boar devouring humans, James’s own watch that tells time in impossible ways.
Kim’s prose oscillates between visceral action sequences and quieter character moments. The Market scenes in Lapis Lazuli showcase her ability to build atmosphere through sensory overload (“saliva welled up beneath James’s tongue as the smell of fried chicken, butter, herbs, and garlic filled his nose”) while interrogating the economics of this strange dimension. The novel’s intriguing connection between Korean cultural identity and its fantasy elements will hopefully be explored in greater depth in future volumes of the series.
EYE IN THE BLUE BOX offers readers an intricate portal fantasy that refuses easy allegiances between good and evil, human and citizen. Whether one finds refuge or further exhaustion in Kim’s sleepless dimension depends entirely on one’s appetite for complexity served with a side of instant ramen. However, those with such an appetite will find themselves eager for the next volume in this demanding but rewarding saga.
Ann Yihyang Kim’s EYE IN THE BLUE BOX: Book One of Eyes of Awakening creates a richly detailed parallel dimension that uses sleep deprivation as both plot device and metaphor for immigrant exhaustion in this complex fantasy novel.
~Edward Sung for IndieReader